


the space and time between us

by elliptical



Series: to own a galaxy [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Alternate Universe - Successful Rebellion, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mistaken Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 20:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5263136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm sorry," the Helmsman says.  His voice is distant, thick with an Old Alternian accent he never had a chance to lose since speaking became irrelevant for him a few thousand sweeps ago.  A second later you realize his body is swaying from side to side, and you dart forward just in case you need to catch him.</p><p>You're about to ask what exactly he's apologizing for, but he adds, "I was dreaming."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the space and time between us

**Author's Note:**

> writing's been hard lately. maybe writing short stories will kick my ass back into gear? who knows!  
> anyway i had to cut this off when i did bc otherwise i would have. ended up with another novel on my hands
> 
> ...i really don't know what all to tag this for. general alternian unpleasantness, general confusion, unpleasant character implications
> 
>  
> 
> _the trail of crumbs you left somehow got lost along the way_  
>  _if you never meant to leave then you only had to stay_  
>  _but the memories that haunt us are cherished just the same_  
>  _as the ones that bring us closer to the sky, no matter how gray_  
>  _yet i fall through these clouds, reaching, screaming_  
>  _-injection, rise against_

The Helmsman has been standing in front of the viewport for nearly an entire standard planet rotation, not so much as shifting the weight on his feet. The viewport is not a window in that it's not made of clear glass, but it is a curved wall with an amalgamation of feeds from the high-definition cameras mounted around the ship, the images sharper in color and contrast than troll eyes can pick up alone. It's the closest he can get to his ship vision without being wired into the ship itself.

You've been trying to keep out of his way because... well, an itemized list of the reasons you've been keeping out of his way would take about three nights to write, but suffice to say you've been very busy, and you don't really have time to grubsit a quiet ancient who's more afterthought than productive member of society.

Fuck, you feel like a jackass for even thinking that. Point is, the Helmsman has been standing in front of the viewport for nearly an entire standard planet rotation, which is probably better than trying to jack himself back into the column, but still concerning enough to warrant your attention.

"Hey, uh." You hesitate in the middle of the room, but the Helmsman gives no indication that he's heard you. The viewport curves under his feet and over his head, so that his vision on all sides is empty space and starlight. You think that he's probably trying to forget he's standing in this room at all, and then you think that he might literally have forgotten he's standing in this room at all.

You clear your throat. "Hey, buddy. Uh, not to yank you out of what I'm sure is some wild meditation and introspection, but shit like sleep and food and water and actual shitting isn't automatic anymore. You okay?"

Absolutely zero response. Fuck.

Okay. You don't want to startle the guy, considering he could turn you into ash without blinking, but you're also not sure how to get his attention. You've survived this long through a lucky combination of running the fuck away from your problems and very occasionally facing them. The former approach won't be effective if the Helmsman dies of exhaustion on your watch. Feferi (the Empress, fuck, you need to get used to calling her the Empress) has more she wants to learn from him before she lets him die.

(She'll keep coming up with more knowledge she needs, more potential catastrophes, more excuses, so that she can avoid giving up this one tether to the World As It Was. You know this, she knows this, the Helmsman knows this. As far as you're concerned it's pretty fucking unfair but hey, you have enough problems without losing sleep over it. Without losing sleep over him.)

You take a few steps forward and the static around him intensifies. His body doesn't move an inch, his muscles don't so much as twitch, but you get the sense of psionic power crawling over your skin like a thousand tiny insects. If he were Sollux, you'd already be monologuing about how creepy this is and how he's playing up the horror flick aspect with startling accuracy and how if he flirts any harder this is going to flip from fondling to kinky electrostim. But the Helmsman isn't Sollux. You don't know where the fuck Sollux is, and for all you know this is the easiest way the Helmsman has to confirm your identity while he learns to use his hands again.

"Hey, okay," you say. "Seriously not trying to crowd your space, but food is important."

The static crackles around your horns, making them itch. You rake a hand through your hair and scratch at your scalp.

"I'm sorry," the Helmsman says. His voice is distant, thick with an Old Alternian accent he never had a chance to lose since speaking became irrelevant for him a few thousand sweeps ago. A second later you realize his body is swaying from side to side, and you dart forward just in case you need to catch him.

You're about to ask what exactly he's apologizing for, but he adds, "I was dreaming."

"Look, dreaming is fine. I know this all must still be disorienting and the viewport's probably comforting and you're not doing anything wrong by being here, but just, you need to sleep and eat and stay hydrated too. You haven't had to think about that for a while so it's easy to forget, but seriously, if you die and I don't do anything then there's a lot of people who are going to be extremely pissed off, and I'm not looking forward to getting my ass handed to me, so if you could..."

"Yes," he says, cutting you off mid-rant, though you're not sure what part he's agreeing with. "The diagnostic protocols are being uncooperative. My system clocks are stuck. Do you know the estimated time of the maintenance completion?"

Oh. Fuck. Okay. You pause, gathering your thoughts.

"Do you remember... Fuck, shit. Do you know where you are?" you ask, as carefully as you can.

"My network is shut off for maintenance. The current coordinates and course are unknown, but as long as the bridge crew has control, we're on track. Updates will be best received from the bridge crew until maintenance is completed." He doesn't sound particularly distressed. If anything the tone is... serene, almost, in a way that accompanies the gentle swaying of his body.

It is the most disturbing thing you have ever witnessed in your life.

"No, fuck, I mean - do you know where you are on the ship?"

"On the ship?" The upward pitch in tone makes it a question, but he sounds about as interested as the mechanical receipt reading of a pizza delivery drone. "Sir, I am the ship."

The 'sir' makes your stomach twist into a painful knot. You are so unqualified for this, oh God you are so unqualified for this, you're a barely molted adult and you have enough responsibility on your shoulders for an entire species and this is one feather tip over the edge, you aren't built for this, you aren't built for this and you can't and you need to call the medical team in to fix him right now. No one would blame you for washing your hands of the situation, you don't know how not to make it worse and oh fuck, okay.

"What's the last thing you remember?" you ask.

"I... remember?" His body finally seems to move with his conscious direction, head cocking to the side, right ear twitching. "The ship datalog can be accessed through the network. I am disconnected from the network until maintenance is complete. Log entries must be manually retrieved through the consoles."

Fuck, okay. He's so fucked up that he can't remember how to store memories in an organic brain, or maybe so fucked up he just can't understand what you're asking. Shit's probably nonlinear too, and that's assuming a miraculous lack of permanent pan damage from the column extraction. No wonder he's so confused.

...you have no idea how to proceed. Someone more qualified than you should take over, so you hold your ground in case he falls and pull out your communicator to make a request for medical assistance.

"Tell them that these drugs are good," he says, and okay, you officially have no idea what the fuck he's talking about, did someone dose him...? "It's important. For the Empress. It's important she knows what things are good and bad. It helps with decision making, and the systems. Reward and punishment. It's important she knows."

You type in the request for medical assistance, keeping detail to a minimum mostly because you don't know how to describe what the fuck is going on. At the very least, you don't need to worry that the staff will mistreat him - even the roughest medicullers have a healthy respect for a troll who could go supernova at any moment, and increase their gentleness accordingly.

He speaks again, still distant, still swaying. "How is the program running without the network?"

For some godforsaken reason, you ask, "What program?" even though you know the answer he gives you will be incomprehensible.

"Warm," he says. You can't tell if that's the program name or an idle observation. "Tell her it's good. Do you feed the information back? Or is the coding output-only? The cameras will pick up the speech either way, assuming this is proper audio encoding. It's good."

You have nothing constructive to say to that since yeah, it was about as incomprehensible as you expected. "Do you think I - you realize I'm real, right. Like I am literally standing behind you and telling you that you need to eat a goddamn meal because otherwise you will die."

"Yes," he says. "I am experiencing wetware distress. The specific diagnostics are attached to the network, which is..."

His knees finally fold as his voice trails off. Catching him might be the only thing you've done right so far.

You lower the pair of you to the ground as you wait for the medics, cradled in the curved lens of the viewport, stars arching above and below you. It's... even more disturbing, the way he looks up at you through Sollux's eyes, the way his teeth curve and his nose points and his limbs fold. He is not Sollux - he's about as far removed from Sollux as a person can get, but despite seeing thousands of sweeps, his body looks barely older than Sollux's would be (is, is, you're going to find him one of these nights).

His gaze unfocuses, drifting over your face and then farther up, latching back onto the stars. The exhaustion and confusion must be hitting him hard, but he still doesn't seem upset. Fuck, the guy thinks he's a stranded malfunctioning ship and he hasn't even raised his voice. "Freaking the fuck out" is your core state of being, while "worry" doesn't even appear to be an emotion he's capable of processing.

He reaches toward your face with a too-thin arm, the worst of the biowire scarring covered by his flight suit, motion slow enough for you to turn away. You don't. You let him brush the pads of his fingertips over your cheeks and the bridge of your nose and the curve of your lips, tracing your outlines the same way his psionics did.

He murmurs something in a language you don't recognize - Old Alternian itself, you think.

"I'm sorry," you say. "I didn't catch that."

He blinks. "I'm very tired," he says. You cradle his head in the crook of your elbow. "Forgive me."

"You're allowed to be tired. Just don't fucking die. The line of people who want to kick my ass is long enough already."

The door opens. Your shoulders slump with relief when two tolerable medics enter, able to strike a balance between the cruelty of the last regime and the patronizing sweetness some of the others adopt in an attempt to please Feferi. That's good. They might have been sent specifically because you don't flip your shit on them nearly as much as the others, which means you're gaining a reputation, which is also good.

"Forgive me," the Helmsman says again, his eyes closing.

"You're fine."

The two staff cross the room with brisk professionalism, and the olive medic offers him a hand. "We're here to help with maintenance," she says.

He takes her hand without question and pulls himself to his feet, leaving you sprawled on the floor like a tool. "Yes," he says, but rather than start toward the medbay, he angles himself so he can look down at you. In this lighting, you can see the creases and scars around his eyes, remnants from thousands of sweeps of psionic strain and aging and de-aging over and over and over again. "Tell her the program is good," he adds, and you're not sure whether he's talking to you or the medics or himself. "It's important she knows what things are good and bad. Tell her the program is good. It's the best likeness she's made yet."

When the door closes behind them, you shudder hard and wrap your arms around yourself. You have so many better things to worry about, and the situation is out of your hands, and the medbay staff will bring him back to lucidity. You have at least fifteen emails to answer, five meetings to schedule, three people to yell at, endless lists to write. But you raise a hand to your face and ghost your fingertips over the places he touched, and you might understand just enough to know you don't understand anything.

He looked at you through Sollux's eyes, all red and blue and glow and genetic replication - while you looked at him through your ancestor's.


End file.
